G4 & G5 RAID compatibility
 

howdy all,

i am in the process of making a home-made 1tb raid 0 + 1 consisting of ATA/100 drives. (limited budget) I had planned on using it primarily for the G4, but now it appears I will have a G5 in the coming week. I know the internal g5 drives are SATA and am trying to figure the best way to use both the G4 and the G5 in conjunction with the raid. The first couple thoughts I had was to use the G4 as a file server and use the ethernet method to access the files from the g5 (but i am unsure of real world read/write times using this method). The other option i thought of was to split the ata external outputs on the raid and purchase a new ata pci internal->external card for the g5 (i think someone makes one of these). This way i could run the raid directly to both machines...however would this slow it up drastially.? Any thoughts or insights would be appreciated as always.


cheers
-adam

There's a product out there called the G5 Jam I believe, which lets you put 4 SATA drives inside a G5. You'll need to kick the system drive into a firewire 800 enclosure. With the 4 drives inside, you can:
Get a seritek SATA controller card (get this particular card)
4 IDE to SATA converters

RAID the drives with OS X (software RAID built into OS X). This is the cheapest way to get a decent RAID 0 setup. I'm not sure about RAID 1+0... that might gobble up a lot of CPU. Or OS X may not support it.

2- Another option is to use the G4 as a RAID box, although that may be kind of a waste of a G4. A Pentium3 would do just as well.

Anyways, you will need gigabit ethernet between the two computers with CAT6 wiring (and possibly a gigE switch). That should give you around a 80MB/s-100MB/s limit on the network (sorry, those numbers may be slightly off).

3- Yet another option is to get a RAID enclosure. They are a variation on #1.

4- You need RAID to edit uncompressed right? If you are doing DV, I would not bother. Your money and time is better spent elsewhere.

5- I don't think this is possible other than with the gigE option (#2)?

thank you glenn for the reply,

using your info ive rethought it and have decided to buy 2 lacie 1 tb drives (this will fit the bill for raid 0 + 1). Ill hook it up to the g5 and then buy 2 Firewire 800 pci cards--one for the g4 and another for the g5. I will then use the firewire 800 to network the macs--i think this transfer speed will be almost as quick as the gigE option.

thanks again

cheers
-adam